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A nutrition education program is coming to an end in Ohio after federal SNAP cuts
By: Amanda Pirani
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LOWER SALEM, Ohio (WOUB) – At Salem-Liberty Elementary School, educator Sarah Layton poses a scenario to a room of 16 second-grade students: What does it look like if you don’t eat a good breakfast?
A few students pretend to fall asleep at their desk, while others act confused about an imaginary class lesson. Layton says they are right on track.
“If I woke up and I decided to skip breakfast this morning, it might be harder for me to focus on something,” she said. “Or maybe my stomach is growling so loud that it causes my classmates not to be able to focus too.”
Layton is a program assistant with SNAP-Ed, which provides free health and nutrition education to SNAP participants and communities.
In Ohio, SNAP-Ed is administered through the Ohio State University Extension, which employs program assistants like Layton in 88 counties. For the past six years, Layton has become a well-known presence in Washington County’s schools and senior centers.
But Layton said today’s visit to Salem-Liberty will be her last.
SNAP-Ed funding cut in One Big Beautiful Bill Act
In July, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act ended a federal requirement to fund Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education, also known as SNAP-Ed.
The move left state programs like Ohio’s suddenly without funds to continue into the next fiscal year. The 33-year-old program, administered through the USDA, was cut as part of what the House Committee on Agriculture described as efforts to decrease wasteful spending.
Ohio SNAP-Ed Program Director Ana Claudia Zubieta said the program served nearly 300,000 people through direct education last year. Its defunding has left her to dismantle a program she spent several years expanding after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s something I had no idea how to do, and … we didn’t have a lot of guidance, because nobody has any idea how to do that from one day to the next,” Zubieta said.
At first it seemed like the program would have to sunset in September, leaving staff scrambling to wrap their work in just a few months. Later, Zubieta received approval to use extra funds to extend through the end of November. She hopes to use the time to transfer projects once led by SNAP-Ed staff to other local organizations.
In addition to classes around nutrition and food budgeting, SNAP-Ed also helped fund efforts to increase access to fresh and healthy foods through projects like community gardens and farmer’s markets. At its peak, the program employed 130 people throughout the state.
“This is a loss for the individuals that we serve with this program, a huge loss for those agencies that work with those individuals,” Zubieta said. “But it is also the lives of 130 people that have lost or are losing their jobs, and they’re losing their benefits, and I feel that every day.”
Historically, SNAP-Ed was funded through the Farm Bill, a piece of federal legislation typically reauthorized every five years. A new farm bill has not been passed since 2018. About 80% of that farm bill funded nutrition programs like SNAP. Many items typically addressed by the farm bill were included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, making it unlikely the legislation will be reauthorized soon.
Staff and teachers say communities will lose out
Crystal Howard, who administered SNAP-Ed in Athens County, said the program had the potential to change people’s lives through healthy behaviors. In Nelsonville, SNAP-Ed grant funding allowed Howard to organize a community garden at a youth center known as The Hive.
“Seeing the kids maintain and water the gardens and weed the gardens … it was really exciting to see that seed of knowledge being planted for these young people,” she said.
When thinking about how health education can improve people’s lives, she recalled a retired mason she worked with at a community center. Back issues limited his movement and he was slowly losing muscle. He didn’t have access to weights, so Howard found another solution.
“I said, ‘a water bottle is 16 ounces, so that’s a pound,’” she said. “I gave him a series of exercises to do for his arms, and over the period of about eight weeks … he could see that the strength was coming back to his arms.”
Kami Lewis is in her 28th year of teaching at North Adams Elementary in Seaman. For years, she’s watched SNAP-Ed provide nutrition lessons for her physical education classes. She said the program filled a gap in her students’ health education and was a resource rural schools don’t often have.
“It was huge for me to have them come in with us,” she said. “Being down here in Adams County, you don’t get a lot of those resources like the other schools get in upper Ohio.”
Alaina Jones, a kindergarten teacher at Lowell Elementary School, said that without SNAP-Ed, teachers like her and Lewis are left to take on more responsibilities.
“I don’t have a nutrition degree or background. I don’t have the resources or the time that someone from SNAP-Ed would have had to create lessons for it,” she said. “So the burden does feel heavier … and that seems to be kind of a pattern, is that once a resource goes away, it falls on the classroom teacher, and if the classroom teacher cannot pick it up, it just doesn’t happen.”
In a policy brief advocating for cuts to SNAP-Ed, the House Committee on Agriculture described the program as “ineffective and duplicative.” Howard disagrees, saying it helps individuals to make lifelong changes that aren’t always quantifiable.
“I wish that they could come and go with us, just for a day, to go out into the field and meet the people where they are, meet the Head Start kids, meet the after-school programming kids, meet those seniors where they are, see the difference that we make,” she said.
SNAP-Ed will continue to operate in Ohio until Nov. 14.
Until then, Layton says she’s doing her best to make the most of her time with students. She’s seen some classes grow up, moving from kindergarten to first and second grade.
“It’s really cool to just go into the schools one last time,” she said. “It makes you kind of think about it differently and really cherish that specific class when you’re doing it.”